First, let’s distinguish the difference between emotions and feelings. When you think of feelings, think physical. A great massage is felt as pleasure. If you put your finger over a flame too long, that is a painful feeling. Anything that stimulates your external or internal physical body could be considered a feeling. Too much spicy sauce with an overabundance of red wine can create an internal “heart burn” feeling.

In life, the ego convinces you that thoughts are real, and you then make choices and take action based on your beliefs about those thoughts. Basically, you are deciding many moments of the day what to do, how to feel, what to say and what action to take – all based on what you are witnessing in your head. And most of it is sourced from the past. This means that you really are rarely present with others. You have a front row seat in your head watching the past movies. And where suffering comes in, is when this is done redundantly over and over for weeks and years.

 When you stub your toe, the ego is absent when the pain is registered in the brain. You are in the NOW, and the ego cannot survive or is silent in the present moment. The little voice does not exist when you experience NOW. Your brain says, “Pain, stubbed toe. Ouch!”

Now if you were three years old and stubbed your toe, you would probably yell out loud, express a few tears, and then say “no big deal,” and you are off to the next adventure, all in about two minutes. This is natural. However, as an adult, after years of learning to become normal and introduce judgment and blame, it may not be so easy to walk away from the stubbed toe incident. 

Normal behavior has taught you differently. Now there could be another thought that says, “Who put that table in my way!” or “Gosh, how clumsy I am for doing that!” And dependent on the identification with your ego, the feeling can either worsen or extend itself longer than necessary.

 I have raised six children. Not one time have I ever witnessed any of my toddlers, when experiencing a stubbed toe, say, “What a day I am having, who put this table here anyway?” Nope, a minute or two of screams, a tear maybe and then off to the next adventure.

I have often drawn on the flip chart: E = Motion. Energy in motion is flowing through the body at all time. Never stopping, always moving and always changing. When you attempt to suppress it, you experience great discomfort. You are messing with universal principals that have been in place since the beginning of time.

 Scientists agree that we are made up of energy. Emotion is energy that travels at light speed from cell to cell in our bodies. Our nervous system feels the world through the body. The master control center lies between our ears and registers all experiences the moment we enter this world.

So to review, feelings are related to sensing the world around us and tell us when we are hungry, tired or excited. Emotions are the reactions to our thoughts. Emotions tell us how we feel about what we are thinking.

For example:

If we have a thought that says “I am hungry” because “I feel” the emptiness in my stomach, we are motivated to take action and feed ourselves. Soon afterwards another thought arrives that says, “I want to eat, but I am so overweight!” Now we have the emotion (not feeling) we may call depression and sadness. This is a reaction to the second thought, not the hunger. It is not the emotion that is saying “depression or sadness;” it is the reaction to the thought which is saying this. The judgment about yourself is what you are reacting to. You are literally watching a negative thought and reacting to it. It doesn’t matter what the subject is. It could be about food, the economy or another person. The story is often irrelevant.

Let’s go deeper with this. The decision of depression and sadness attached to this thought comes from the past and not the present. Like that old song on the radio that creates a picture and an emotion from the past of a person or place, that “old decision about your hunger and your body” also comes from the past. And what do you know of the past? It doesn’t exist. And neither does the future. They are both creations so we can relate and function in the time matrix and interact with each other.

So you are feeling the hunger in the present moment because your stomach is empty. You are experiencing an emotion about the decision of hunger that comes from the past. This is where the contraction in the body takes place. You can’t experience two things at the same time that are in conflict with each other. This is like stepping on the accelerator of a car and the brake at the same time. The engine will overheat. Your body will experience discomfort that you call sadness or whatever you label it.

 What do I mean by this? Your physical body is always in the now. The cells of your body are not dividing or dying yesterday, or tomorrow, they are doing this always in the present moment. Your heart is not beating yesterday, it is beating now. Or you would be dead, and all ego problems are then over!

Your ego is attempting to be in the past with your sadness and depression and re-live the past experience. You cannot be in two places at the same time. It is not possible, and the body that is always in the now will contract to let you know what you are attempting to do.

This causes a contraction of discomfort in your body. Where we make the wrong turn is when we feel this contraction in the body and misdiagnose it. Normal consciousness tends to then say, “I am overweight and hungry again” . . . . and feel the contraction of past and present conflict of thoughts. Normal consciousness will feel the pronounced discomfort from this and say, “I feel even more depressed and sad.” This can trigger a whole series of thoughts that repeat over and over again the depression and the sadness in an endless cycle of suffering.

It is not because of what we are thinking, it is because we are attempting to take a past decision and overlay it on a present condition. If we want to change things, it is far better to do so from a powerful and resourceful state. When we are in conflict with ourselves, it can be challenging to gather the strength to take positive action.

Now let’s talk about emotion. Think of emotion as a feeling that is responding from a thought, not an external stimulus.  If you bring in a past thought of losing a loved one, you feel sad. You think of a funny movie you saw the night before, and you may even laugh out loud. You are reacting to the pictures or thoughts in your head, not the actual event.

You have emotion about what you are experiencing in your mind. The body does not know the difference. Whether you react to the real event or the image in your mind, it feels just as real to the body. That is why your blood pressure can raise just thinking about a stressful event. Only your mind knows the difference.

I use this principal when designing my programs, like Leap of Faith. Your mind knows that you are in a program and that you are safe. However, your body reacts to the thoughts in your head about what I put in front of you. Your reaction of emotion to the thoughts in your head is what the program is about. You are not scared of the confrontation in front of you; you are scared of what the thoughts in your head are telling you about the confrontation in front of you. Your ego can only use fear against you in the future or past. You have a chance to witness consciously your own patterns and decisions from your past. You get to make new choices in the NOW and take action. Once you take action, you enter the NOW and leave the ego voice behind. This is freedom.

The tendency to make yourself wrong about the decisions you made from your past is just more ego programming and is irrelevant to who you really are. That is where I come in. My job is to gently guide you back to the reality of NOW and challenge your past thoughts. You realize that they are not real and no longer have hold on you. That is taking your Leap of Faith.

At the Leap of Faith, people often arrive on Friday night looking very similar in their energy and thought patterns. Yet, less than 24 hours later, when allowed to be in present time by introducing NOW exercises and situations, everyone arrives to the same place: connection, emotional validation that we are all ONE, and in other words, a loving existence. The frequency in the whole room is lifted. This happens at every event, for each person and as a whole. It is felt. This is the natural world. It is where we are headed. You can go kicking and screaming into paradise or dancing joyfully. You get to choose.

Not one person in all the years I have taught this program has ever told me that they do not want more love and connection in their life. Thousands of graduates agree that this experience is natural, and the reason to be alive. All I do is provide an opportunity to experience the truth. And when people do this, they experience freedom. And then the greatest adventure begins – the only adventure worth committing to.

The highest emotional frequency of energy is Love. It has been measured by many scientists that love is felt in the body, and the brain records a frequency that is recognizable when measured. It literally is now proven that you can record the brain waves of a mother’s love for their baby. The impulses are measurable and felt in the body and imprinted in the brain.

This frequency is felt throughout the body. The brain cells are the same throughout the entire nervous system. The same cell that lives in your brain is in nerves of your stomach as well as your chest and other regions of the body. You feel this predominately in the chest, stomach and throat area. These are where specific energy transmitters and receivers congregate in the body.  That is why we put our hand over our heart when we say, “Ah, I love you.” Can you imagine what it would look like to put your hand over your forehead and say the same thing?

Love is not felt in the past or the future. Love is felt only in the present moment. While we can say, “I love you.” We are really saying, “I am experiencing love for you NOW.”  We do not say, “I love you yesterday, I love you next Thursday;” we say “I love you (now).” When we bring in a thought of someone from the past we love, we experience the love for them as we reflect on loving thoughts of them and feel them NOW in the present moment. It can bring tears to our eyes, while we are alone and driving the car. This is the appropriate use of past and future thinking. It fills the body with a soothing and healing frequency.

What does all this have to do with emotion and Spirit? Everything!

If we experience love, we are being in touch with our loving nature. Nature, meaning natural. Not normal, but natural and present with the highest vibration there is. When we are stimulated by the outside world, and along comes a thought that is judgmental, condemning or hurtful, we have a variety of responses we can choose.

We can lash back, harm and suffer. We can feel the thought, recognize the contraction in the body as a message that we are bringing in negative and unloving thoughts of the stimulus and then choose a different response. This is what all the sages, prophets and religious leaders have taught for thousands of years.

 It has been measured in the brain that thoughts of anger, blame and judging others are of a very low frequency and vibrate at a lower rate in the nervous system. The body is forever in the now and vibrates at a very high, loving frequency. It is what keeps the pace maker going. When you introduce a lower vibration into a higher one like love, you get conflict. You get contraction.

Would you wake up a sleeping infant with a bucket of ice water? No, of course not. You tenderly lean over and gently stroke their back with loving energy and softly whisper sweet sounds of affection. This is the energy of love that is more natural and in tune with the little receiver at the other end of your transmission.

When you entertain an unloving thought in your body, you are throwing a bucket of ice water energetically over your nervous system. Your body is telling you this by the contraction you immediately feel. This is registered in the body as discomfort.

This gap between the two types of energy causes a conflict. It is what Jesus called, “The house divided against itself.”  It is a war in the body that can be very painful and cause prolonged suffering.

In the normal world, we tend to add more pain to the suffering by doing “more of the same” redundant thinking of blame, getting angrier and more ego attacks on others and ourselves. This further intensifies the pain and agitates and widens the gap between the two vibrations even more.

 The ego will distort and feed the original experience, and it grows as it is fed lower frequency thoughts. Eventually we tire, become distracted; take drugs or alcohol so we can temporarily escape the “bad feeling.” This is avoiding the confrontation that is within. And like bacteria, it only grows bigger to surface another day.

The problem is not what is happening; the problem is how you are relating to the thoughts in your head about what is happening. Loving thoughts just do not feel the same as unloving thoughts. Does this mean that you are supposed to have loving thoughts all the time?  What I am saying is that you must pay attention to the “unloving pictures” that you are thinking and take responsibility to raise them to a level that is at harmony with the frequency of the body. Resurrection of the lower into the higher is the Leap of Faith. It is the walk of the master.

To bring the experience of Oneness and love into every moment of your life is your mission. This takes a Berserker-like state of mind and must be the highest priority of your day. You must learn to lay down your sword of ego to yourself. And put your hand over your heart and say “Yes” to love and all it brings to you. You then can cross over into a new time where anger and hate are no longer an option.

So, to sum it up, Spirit will use what is available to wake you up.  If you offer suffering to Spirit, that will be the path of your awakening.  Discomfort and pain will get your attention and make you eventually take action. What kind of action you take will extend, prolong or deepen your suffering, or it will free you.

Your Spirit prefers joy and freedom over pain and suffering. But your Spirit will also allow you to follow your ego which is based in past and future fear. Your Spirit will not judge you and is unconditionally loving to your choices. But you do not have to travel the hard road unless you choose to.

It will take a radical shift in your awareness to notice your thoughts and notice that when you are having “unloving thoughts” on anything, you will suffer. That is the phone call from God, your Spirit to shift something. If you blame, continue to judge others for your pain, you continue to suffer. That is how it works.

You do not have to wait to “feel forgiveness.” If you choose to forgive, please know that this is not a feeling, it is a notion. The moment you bring in the notion of forgiveness, you begin to raise the vibration in your body. You are asking your Spirit to help you give up the right to punish someone and yourself.

Yes, we must learn to have loving thoughts if we want to be free. How do you do this when there is so much suffering in the world? So many to blame and so much evil everywhere?  Just look to your heart. Look to your experiences in your past that have brought you to tears of compassion. Ask yourself, “How did I do that?  How did I experience such a wonderful feeling in my heart?”

 And you will always get the same answer – you embraced a loving thought of someone or some experience. Your body told you in present time that this was good. This was a pleasurable feeling and responded to your thoughts with sensations of joy and peace. Is that not true?

So, know that your Spirit has brought you right here right now. You are now reading these words. Consider the possibility that if any of this makes sense to you, then there is no accident that you are here with me right now connecting through the experience of a written word. These words are written with love in my heart for all who read it. If you can feel it now, then you and I have just raised our vibration and connected in a beautiful way. Take another step and feel others who are also reading these words as they connect with you beyond time and space.  If you hear the slightest whisper in your ear that you feel my loving intent for you, then I am pleased.

Go into your day, go into your life and go into the next moment and start to use the contraction in your heart and body as the gift it was intended to be. Each of us has a personal and direct line to our Spirit and God. It is called the human heart. It is faster than any internet. Your Spirit is the server that will download to you the most loving thoughts from God of the highest vibration ever imagined. Just ask, intend and take your leap.

How do I know this? I know this because I experience it every time I stand in front of you and teach. I know this as I write these words.  When it hurts, it is not the outside world that you must seek for comfort; it is your own private thinking mind where you must go. Ask your natural loving heart for guidance.

Hell can invite you into the darkness where the Botha lives. And we all know that in Warrior Spirit, the Botha lives for one reason. To set us free and to teach us about the infinite love we are capable of expressing.

I will share with you more insights as they come forth in future issues. I will gladly offer strategies, daily tools and life circumstances to practice the “walk of the master.”  There will be more programs coming where we will all meet to practice a new way of being. I am eager to walk with all of you as we move into a new time together. I learn as I teach, and you all have taught me well.